


leave the path that led me to that place

by nyklen



Category: Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: F/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, Sort Of, also there's lots of wine, in which ilsa and alanna become friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27432937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyklen/pseuds/nyklen
Summary: Kashmir gives Ilsa the out she has been looking for, except, you can’t really take the spy out of the agent. Or, post-Fallout, Ilsa comes a full circle.
Relationships: Ilsa Faust/Ethan Hunt
Comments: 5
Kudos: 60





	leave the path that led me to that place

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, I started this fic post-Fallout and finally got around to finishing it because hey, pandemic year. It started off more as a meditation of Ilsa post-Fallout but I guess the fic has its own mind. Title from Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, because why not. Hope you enjoy.

Kashmir gives her the out she has been looking for. With Solomon Lane back in British custody, the SIS grudgingly acknowledges that she’s clean and clear. In exchange for not contacting anyone from her past, she gets the spy version of an honourable discharge: a more-than-decent retirement package, an expunged record, and a brand new civilian identity.

As far as the world is concerned, Ilsa Faust died in a firefight with an Apostle cell, on her last mission for MI6, not one week after Lane’s capture.

As far as the agent formerly known as Ilsa Faust is concerned, she is free.

\--------------------

She toys with the thought of attending Hunley’s state funeral, as much as that breaches her promise to MI6.

In the end, she finds herself lurking behind the trees at Arlington, as the tail-end of the priest’s sermon ( _“though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”_ ) is carried to her by the brisk wind.

She sees Ethan and Benji and Luther and Brandt, their faces uncharacteristically solemn and grim. Her heart squeezes in sympathy, and a part of her wishes she could have offered her erstwhile allies a measure of comfort.

As the ceremony ends and the crowd drifts, she sees Ethan look up sharply. Before his gaze falls on her, she whips back around the trees and walks away, melding seamlessly into another congregation across the cemetery.

(Sometimes, though, she wonders if the news of her death ever reached American ears.

Ever reached _them._ )

\--------------------

She escapes to an extended, long-overdue vacation in Sicily:

Anna Holm (she is beginning to wonder someone in the Records department at SIS is a huge fan of Ingrid Bergman), rents an overly-spacious villa, speaks broken Italian with an American accent and a winsome smile, has hair the shade of blonde which most likely comes from a bottle, and spends most of her time on the beach soaking in the sun, sand, sea and Shiraz.

It is perfect: her ligature marks and cuts and bruises and aches slowly fade with the days; her pale skin takes on a healthy bronze hue; and while she still goes to bed with a gun under her pillow and a knife against her thigh, more often than not she sleeps soundly through the night – her dreams, if any, hardly end up in horrific nightmares of screams and blood and death.

Three months, two weeks, and four days in and she thinks she might be going stir-crazy from having absolutely nothing to do.

(and it is not as if spy agencies have career sites for her to submit her CV.)

\--------------------

She returns from the beach one day to a gift basket on her porch.

By all accounts, this shouldn’t be out of the norm – the resort front desk has instructions to drop off whatever mail at her villa, but something about this particular delivery screams “hand-delivered”, as in, to her door, and she learnt a long time ago to trust her instincts.

A cursory glance shows no timer, analog, digital, or otherwise, and so she figures there is no further harm in bringing it into the house, considering whoever delivered it already knows her whereabouts.

Nestled amidst the overpriced bottles of Lafite and ripening tropical fruits she finds a bubble-wrapped phone.

Never one to turn down wine, she uncorks the wine and pours herself a glass, raising it in view of the phone’s camera as she mouths a “Cheers!”

\--------------------

The phone rings three days later, breaking the early morning still as she lounges beside the villa’s unnecessary infinity pool, watching the sun peek over the eastern horizon.

“Glad to see you enjoyed my gift, Ms… _Faust_ , or is it Holm now, I do need to keep track.”

She easily recognises the crisp, slightly-mocking British accent from months of tailing, “Alanna.”

“I think I might have need of someone with your skills. I hope I’m not interrupting your retirement?”

\--------------------

Which is how she ends up as the White Widow’s go-to contractor-fixer-person (they never put a label on it, and might as well, she doesn’t exactly need to print name cards).

It is not as though she needs the obscene amounts of money Alanna offers.

Nor is it because the first job was such a resounding success (quite the opposite rather, involving an abandoned church in the outskirts of Budapest, at least three difference agencies and five Apostles, various double-crosses, and Ilsa barely making it out with a very 90s-looking diskette hidden in a crumbling old book).

She’d told Ethan Hunt once in a crowded train station she wanted to escape from it all. But after four months of _nothing_ she realises she is irrevocably held in the thrall of it like a junkie: the travel, the adrenaline rush, and the high during, and the thrill following an accomplished mission. She even _enjoys_ the exhaustion and the aches and the white marks of scars she wears like badges of honour.

A long time ago, she fancied she would have to be dragged kicking, screaming, and broken, to return to the life.

In reality, it only took a few months of lollygagging in the sun before she all but ran smiling back into its open arms.

You can take the agent out of the game, but you can’t take the spy out of the agent.

\--------------------

She opts to use her new identity (“Ilsa Faust” would have attracted too much attention for a ghost), but Zola, one evening after three too many shots of vodka, and quite possibly after an _Umbrella Academy_ Netflix binge, drunkenly declares her “the Swede”.

She thinks it’s too obvious and _so_ _cliché_ but then Zola looks entirely too pleased with himself and the fond, familiar smirk Alanna gives her younger brother makes her heart ache and so the moniker is sealed.

\--------------------

It takes the better part of five months before she runs into _them_ again.

She’s on a cleaning mission against one of Alanna’s many enemies, which, when talking about weapons dealers, often means setting a honeypot trap in a too-revealing gown at an ostentatious party in a magnificent mansion (Madrid this round).

As luck has it, she finishes her mission and in process of leaning nonchalantly on a second-floor ionic-inspired pillar when she notices _him_. From there, it does not take long to ID the rest of the team, including an unknown tall East Asian brunette.

She tarries a while, fighting the pang in her heart as she watches them work as a team (even in her rookie days in MI6, it was always only in pairs, or with her handler), a wistful nostalgia bubbling up for the lost camaraderie found in London and Kashmir.

She makes it out safe and unscathed, but not before recklessly slipping a note into Ethan’s coat pocket, a kin to the one on her door in Casablanca.

Even without words, its message is clear: _you always knew where to find me._

\--------------------

There are no allies in statecraft, only common interests.

Atlee drills that into her from day one, and for years thereafter of his indoctrination shows: she writes her family through her time with MI6, her envelopes invariably covered with so many postmarks from as many countries their origin can no longer be discerned, her initial letters censored so heavy in black line she resorts to writing generic greeting card sentiments in the end. She follows family holidays on Instagram and watches her nephews grow up on Facebook through cloaked devices hiding their profiles amidst thousands of other generated clicks. She wonders if they know of their long-lost aunt Ilsa, who sacrificed family to save the world (at least, she hopes, that’s the story they tell – she’s certain it’s probably something not as heroic).

(When she leaves the MI6 building for the last time, the irony of it all hits her – she is free, but ghosts do not show up at their parents’ homes, ever.

Ghosts do however, send the occasional cryptic postcard.)

She learns to embrace solitude.

Two years deep undercover with the Syndicate had turned her into a lone wolf, wary and snarling and quick to pounce. Being Lane’s favourite pet slowly chips away at her – she trusts her fellow rogue agents as much as they do her (none), and wearies of constantly checking over her shoulder.

If she were being truthful, her desire for an _ally_ in this whole Syndicate mess makes her risk Lane’s trust for the American agent with whom she feels in sync with. Ethan Hunt’s ragtag IMF first introduces her to a concept of a family: she sees their care for one another, and the ease with which they accepted her into their fold. The foundation that Atlee builds slowly gives way to cracks.

With Alanna they stumble into a semblance of friendship. It begins with another completed job and finds them on her couch in her penthouse with glasses of 1990 Latour (“I just found myself in possession of some cases,” she’d said, all cautious casualness, “perhaps we should inspect the payment”).

That interlude lays the groundwork. Sure, they are bound by common interests, but in the other they recognise someone as isolated; and she learns more about Alanna over two bottles of Latour than in more than six months of tailing her throughout Europe.

She thinks that in another lifetime, another place, their friendship would be the easy one with laughter and lunches and closeness. In this iteration, they trade war stories and unwind over guns and paradoxes and wine while treading softly in the margins of defining their relationship.

\--------------------

In Rio she gets made.

(It’s not like her cover hasn’t been blown before, but it happens so rarely she allows herself a brief moment to be impressed before she turns her focus full-on getting out in one living, breathing piece.)

She’d been there for an exchange during the Carnival and as she stakes out her meeting spot her contact shows up with two Apostles who definitely clocked her face, and in lip-reading she is pretty sure one of them mutters “Ilsa Faust” and she is _definitely_ made.

Her text to Alanna is brief, “bad tooth. earliest appt?”

She holes up waiting for her extraction in a cramped run-down apartment in an equally ramshackle building with chipped paint and bare concrete and furnishings from the early nineties, and wonders not for the first time, if nice, comfortable safe houses existed or only as an oxymoron. That extraction only happens a week later (good thing she only has a bullet graze) amidst an attempted coup (just her luck) and a beleaguered government demanding the closure of all Brazilian airspace.

When she gets back to London, Alanna glances at her with a nonchalant “good you’re alive”, and they both pretend to ignore the latter’s slight hand tremor as she pours them each three fingers worth of Macallan 32.

\--------------------

She receives her next job soon after that.

“The CIA requests this, as a… favour for Brazil,” Alanna says, passing Ilsa a slim manila envelope. “I don’t have much more details other than what’s in there.” Her tone is light as always, her posture relaxed.

She reads the warning in the flick of Alanna’s eyes: _be careful_.

\--------------------

By that design, it is her who finds them again.

It is startlingly similar to when she found Ethan in the men’s room at the Grand Palais, except this round it is Benji, against a wickedly sharp knife, just off to the side of the Temple of Dendur’s reflecting pool.

The sound of her gunshot is thankfully muzzled by the silencer. She surveys her surroundings nonchalantly and watches the blood ribboning in the water while Benji hastily picks himself off the ground and straightens his suit.

Then for a good long moment, he goggles at her, mouth agape.

Ilsa?” (because sometimes even she forgets that Ilsa – that she – is supposed to be dead)

She pretends to suffer his hug only because he surprises her with it, but she enjoys the rare moment of true affection.

“Ilsa?”

She thinks her ears might be suffering some weird aftereffect despite the silenced gunshot until Brandt rounds the corner, gun drawn and stares at her.

“You’re alive?”

She waits while the IMF regroups. Benji’s hand is still a firm grip on her arm, and she doesn’t need to look at him to know his mind is racing a million miles a minutes to reconcile this reality and her very much alive presence; Brandt gives her a furrowed brow; Luther gives her a rare smile that reads like “about time you showed up”; the Asian brunette stares suspiciously at her, gun by her side and index finger twitching against the trigger guard.

Ethan is last to the room, and he near skids to a halt on the marble floors when he sees her.

“Ilsa.” She can hear the shock in his voice and sees the questions in his eyes.

As much as she wants to stay for a (misplaced) reunion, part of her still feels like a trespasser in their crew (mostly her fault really, she skipped out on them in Kashmir, and the next thing she expects they hear Ilsa Faust had died in service of crown and country, and now she shows up on their home turf in New York? She can’t be too sure of her welcome here.)

Plus, she still has a job to complete.

She smiles out a “Hello” and turns to leave.

“Wait, you are the Swede?” she hears Benji choke out behind her. _Dammit, Zola._

\--------------------

Spies, in general, are not big on sentiment. Sentimentality makes one vulnerable, gets one killed.

Ilsa knows this (another one of Atlee’s Important Lessons), and so she cannot explain why she keeps a safety deposit box under an assumed name with a bank at a branch in Shoreditch.

In it she stores mementoes of her past and her present, knickknacks which ground her and keep her sane.

Amongst the many passports and wads of cash she keeps on hand are: letters and greeting cards from her family to her, care of SIS, of birthdays and anniversaries and holidays she has missed; a photo the day she graduated from college, cap askew and degree grasped tightly in her hands; a pair of dice from her first ever mission; a simple silver ring, etched “IH+NT, 2009”; and a letter she wrote before she joined the Syndicate to clear her name.

On the day her flight from Sicily touches back down onto rainy English soil, she adds another item to the box – a polaroid taken in Kashmir, four days after they averted a nuclear disaster, and two weeks before Ethan was medically cleared to stand, let alone go out into the bracing cold.

_(She had been standing off to the side, Julia had insisted on taking the photo “as a keepsake” and Benji cajoled her into joining._

_"I’m not part of the IMF, remember?”_

_He’d then pulled out the antenna from his talkie, and touched her on both shoulders with it. With an exaggerated dramatic flair, “I hereby dub thee an honorary member of the IMF. Now will you take the photo with us?”)_

Frozen in time on paper, they stand huddled against the cold in the photo, all cheery smiles and eyes squinting against the sun. Ethan’s arm is slung about her waist – half carelessly, and half to take the weight off his broken ankle.

She does an Irish exit on them, disappearing that night when MI6’s car for her finally arrives.

\--------------------

For six days, she feels bad for filching the USB drive from Benji (sort of – he has a backup somewhere, she’s sure).

It stops the moment she swings by Alanna’s speakeasy ( _“come by, we need to talk,” her text read_ ) and sees Ethan at the bar, tumbler of whiskey in hand. Her exit is blocked by Luther’s imposing bulk, while Benji and the Asian brunette lounge on overstuffed chairs near the stage, where Alanna croons Nina Simone. For a brief moment it feels like a restaging of Liverpool Street Station.

She lifts an accusing eyebrow at Alanna, who smiles and returns with a near imperceptible shrug without breaking tune, as she moves towards the bar.

“Ilsa,” he greets, all toothy delighted smiles.

For an agent, Ethan Hunt’s face is too expressive with his emotions.

“Ethan,” she feels trapped and cornered, yet the familiar surroundings don’t make her as tense as she should be.

He starts to speak, mouth opening then clamping shut as the maître d approaches them and bows to her, “Miss Holm, your private booth is ready.”

\--------------------

The booth is more a room, commonly for clandestine meetings and the like. Located towards the back of the club, it is private, velvet-lined, mostly soundproof, and definitely bulletproof. A hidden speaker pipes in the low hum of Alanna’s dulcet tones while half a wall yields space to camera feeds covering every inch of the floor.

She lets her eyes flick over his face, committing changes to his features since Kashmir (that meeting in New York was too brief) – the cuts on his face have healed, and the angry bruise on his cheekbone has subsided, but he looks more tired and worn, a couple new frown lines grace his forehead.

He alternates between sipping his whiskey and staring at her, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

She breaks the silence first, “you got my note?”

“I got _the_ note, but I wasn’t sure…” he trails off. She thinks she understands – the subterfuge, the difficulty in trusting… she wouldn’t be sure if she was in his shoes either – and starts to reply, but he beats her to the punch with a small smile and dark, serious eyes, “It's good to see you, Ilsa.”

‘Alive’ is the word he doesn’t say but she hears anyway. She smiles back, a light “you always knew where to find me” and then looks away from his gaze, a warmth spreading through her she doesn’t care (at least, not right now) to identify.

They spend a comfortable silence until Benji, Luther, and the Asian brunette join them minutes later.

“So, Anna Holm?”

“When I was discharged, they gave me a new identity.” She arches an eyebrow upward for emphasis, “we are talking about the same agency who gave me _Faust_ as a last name.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Benji struggle to hide a grin, “glad you’re here with us, Ilsa.”

“And you,” she smiles, genuine warmth bubbling within her. “How much trouble am I in this time?”

\--------------------

Luther places the USB drive she stole on the table separating them (she recognises it, if only for the very specific scratch marks she’d made to ensure it wasn’t replaced) and for a brief moment she toys with the idea of demolishing Alanna’s very precious, very sacred wine cellar.

Instead, she opts for a raised eyebrow.

Ethan calls her bluff, “you were contracted by the White Widow to retrieve this, for undisclosed recipients. And when you did, it was returned to the rightful owners.”

“The CIA.” Zhen.

Ilsa thinks those months in the sun must have baked her brains, since she still can’t figure how this relates to why and how _they_ are here.

“Thing is,” Benji pipes up helpfully, “our mission was to be at the Met with the drive exactly that day for a certain period of time to meet a “the Swede” for a trade.” With air quotes for emphasis on her Zola-bestowed moniker.

Ilsa begins to catch on. “You’re telling me, my job was to steal something from the CIA for the CIA?”

“Yes.” They all start as Alanna enters through the door.

“Why?” Ilsa asks as Ethan barks a “You knew?”

The White Widow makes them wait, sliding gracefully into the remaining chair with an almost theatrical flourish. “Not from the start. The CIA requested I broker this meeting, and gave me the time, and place, and asked me to send my best contractor. I don’t ask for specifics beyond that. She was rather clear it was a delicate mission… to be handled with finesse by my best. Ilsa’s my best.”

Five agents seize on the pronoun immediately, “she?”

In the ensuing silence you can hear a pin drop before Ilsa finally pieces the puzzle together.

“Erica Sloane.”

“Why?” Ethan this time.

\--------------------

Alanna arranges the meeting with Erica, and Ilsa finds herself in Paris (“it’s neutral ground”) for the second time in eighteen months. As she enters their designated meeting spot in the Sully Wing, she recognises the artwork on the walls and tamps down the almost harsh laughter which threatens to bubble out her throat.

“Perhaps I should’ve worn a jewelled cape and a feathered cap here too,” she drawls, and relishes the momentary surprise in the CIA chief’s eyes as the latter whips around, caught off-guard.

She moves up alongside Erica, casts a critical eye at the La Tour in front of them, and taps her finger on her nose thoughtfully, dramatically “would that make you the cheat with the ace of diamonds then?” She tries to keep her tone light – and mostly succeeds, but a light, sharp tinge of annoyance remains, and she knows the other woman well enough that that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Erica turns to look at her, eyebrow arched, and shrugs “and that would make you alive – I had a hunch.”

In her ear Ilsa can almost _feel_ Alanna seethe as Ethan chuckles. Despite herself, she laughs – SIS agent, freelance, or no, she is still pawn to agency chiefs and their whims.

\--------------------

It takes two weeks and a few crates of Lafite (courtesy of Erica Sloane) and some not-so-subtly veiled hints before Alanna grudgingly continues her business arrangement with the CIA, and so Ilsa gets a two-week lull too. Quite coincidentally (probably courtesy of Erica Sloane too), it is the same period of time in which Ethan’s IMF team seemingly has no missions to save the world, and are simply enjoying an overly-long sojourn in London.

She finds herself swept back into their fold as though the months post-Kashmir didn’t happen. The IMF gang stay at Benji’s townhouse, and she finds herself invited over on a daily basis for various meals and once on a Friday, for karaoke night (“when else would you have karaoke night, Ilsa?”) with Benji’s retro classics collection and too much alcohol and popcorn.

She wakes up, curiously warm and comfortable, the next morning to the sound of Brandt’s snoring, television static, and breakfast sizzling (in that order), and finds herself curled on the couch on Ethan’s lap, his arm slung carelessly around her shoulders as his body slumps towards her back. His face looks peaceful in sleep, the worry lines etching it in day fading in slumber that she resists the urge to touch his face or smooth her hands through his tousled hair.

(They would skirt around acknowledging it for some time, but she remembers: high on a heady, delirious mix of enjoyment and tequila and the aftermath of yelling Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, she’d leaned into him, arms around his neck even as he grabs her waist for balance, his smile against her ear and then the light press of his lips on her temple.)

\--------------------

In the London interlude, they find themselves growing closer, a delayed pick-up from the promise of an _after_ in Kashmir, first with little touches here and looks there, before karaoke Friday kicked everything into a higher gear.

On the IMF’s second last day, he persuades her to show him London as a native, and they spend a day at her favourite haunts and lanes and old record stores and the Maltby street market. He kisses her, on impulse, in a pause on their stroll along the Thames, with the Eye’s lights shimmering in the background, and she finds herself responding. It becomes their first (proper) kiss, and she swears it tastes like Casablanca and echoes of longing and _them_.

When they pull apart on an intrusive catcall, she’s not the only one breathing a little too hard, pupils slightly blown and unfocused. “Ilsa,” he begins, voice rough. But there is a pause, in which he stutters, and the moment hovers.

She watches as he takes a deep breath, watches as he gathers himself. When he looks at her again, his eyes are a steady, determined green.

“Come away with me, Ilsa.”

\--------------------

If allies are frowned upon, sentiments are discouraged, then attachments are near forbidden.

Sure, sex was permitted, agencies knew well-enough agents needed an outlet to release tension, but love, romance, relationships and all that mumbo-jumbo was a near mythological creature within their ilk. It was too messy, too complicated, too dangerous, just _too_ , their handlers had preached ad-nauseam, and lives could be at stake.

Ilsa learnt it the hard way early on. She tries not to think about it in terms other than a lesson for her foolishness and the perceived invincibility of youth, because till now there remains a dull ache in her heart for an erstwhile partner and she tries to lock the memories and feelings away like she did the ring in that safe deposit box in Shoreditch.

It helps in a way - the loss hardens her, like an exoskeletal shell made of hurt and regret, the constant globetrotting keeps the attachments minimal; she has liaisons and she has one night stands and she doesn’t lack for strangers in bars and hotels, but she remains unattached, remote.

Then she meets a certain American agent in a damp basement in London and feels the same attraction and recklessness well up within her like those years ago.

With Ethan though, their relationship has always been defined by missions and objectives, action and reaction. They have always circled amongst the blurry lines of colleagues, friends, and something more, torn between desire and doubt.

Until they circle back again to London where they first started, caught in an intermission without their usual definitions, and Ethan’s plea rings in her ears long after they have been snatched by the brisk spring wind.

The metaphorical ball is in her court.

\--------------------

“I’m fine if you want to leave me for them, you know,” Alanna mentions offhandedly one day weeks later, over celebratory drinks in the middle of Ilsa’s post-mission jet-lag. It jolts her awake like eight espressos and an entire thirteen-hour flight back to London mentally dissecting crappy action movies failed to do.

“Who asked?”

Alanna shrugs, “I had a feeling since Sloan orchestrated New York, besides, I’m not going to tattle just so you can _hunt_ him down,” levelling a stare that attempts to be serious before her lips quirk into a mischievous smile on her terrible pun. “Really, we wouldn’t be at a loss without you. Much. It’s getting easier to find good contractors these days, especially with more excommunicated-Apostles coming out of the woodwork.”

“You’re terrible at reverse psychology.”

“ _Go._ ”

\--------------------

And that is how she finds herself in Dulles on a record-breaking summer’s day in July, her duffel hoisted over one shoulder as perspiration beads on her neck in defiance of the airport cooling systems.

She briefly glares at the floor-to-ceiling windows before years of spycraft kicks in and she scans the terminal, her fellow passengers, and clocks all its exits. Benji had offered to pick her from the airport, but not seeing his familiar face, she resigns to the wait and stalks towards the nearest Starbucks for coffee.

That is, until halfway into her search for coffee her ears register quickening footsteps and heavy panting, and she feels a hand land on her shoulder. Recognition loses out to muscle memory as she twists the arm backwards (enough to hurt, not to maim) before realising who its owner is.

Benji looks at her from his bent over position, face half-screwed in pain “hey Ilsa… sorry, ow shouldn’t have jumped you like ow that.”

\--------------------

(It all starts with a phone call: Alanna, in one of her uncharacteristically helpful moments – and disturbingly, rather eagerly – volunteers to put in the call to Sloan. “Current employer,” pointing to herself, “to new employer,” gesturing vaguely in some other direction.

“Same employer” Ilsa mutters under her breath and is rewarded with a quick scowl – Alanna has always been touchy where her liaisons with the CIA are concerned.

Sloan instructs her to lay low and not contact the team while she “sorts this mess out”. She tries to be stern but Ilsa can hear the faint amusement in her voice.

Of course, Sloan doesn’t take into account that the IMF is more resourceful than her, for not 24 hours later she gets a video call from Benji. “We’re surprising Ethan,” he crows the moment the line connects, looking like the proverbial cat who caught the canary.

“We?”  
“We.” A brief silence reigns before she cocks an eyebrow. “Well you know, the team, excluding Ethan of course… and Zhen, and Jane. You haven’t met Jane before, and I know you just met Zhen, but they’ve been part of the larger IMF team for a while and they heard about you and thought it was amusing to see Ethan’s reaction so they’re helping on this but if you’re not comfortable with them I can totally tell th–“

“Benji,” she interrupts gently, “you’re rambling.”

“–I am rambling.”

Benji fills her in: he has an automated search queried for Ilsa’s name(s) – and the rest of the team too, he defends – and why just the other day his system pings with a new result… on IMF’s very servers. From there it was “surprisingly easy, I wouldn’t have thought that at all!” for Brandt and Luther to wrest the details from Sloan, who agreed go along with this “harmless mission” (Benji’s words), and he might have mentioned something to Zhen, who filled Jane in, and thus Operation Annie Lennox was born (Ilsa _definitely_ doesn’t want to know how he came up with that name).

And as key to the whole operation, would Ilsa be okay with this plan too?

“Hmmm,” she says, making a show of knitting her eyebrows together and fidgeting on the couch as nervous energy radiates out of Benji through the screen. “We all know Ethan doesn’t like surprises,” she scolds gently, and Benji’s face nearly falls.

“Well um, y-“

She flashes him her biggest grin, “I’m in.”

Benji almost sags in relief, before perking up again, “I’m picking you up from the airport!”)

\--------------------

The drive towards DC is spent mostly in comfortable silence, until they cross the 14th Street Bridge and Benji sighs.

“Ilsa,” he starts, a tone in his voice, and she knows he’s serious when he pulls to the road shoulder, looks at her, and takes a breath. “As his best friend, I know he truly cares for you, and – let me finish – I think, I know you care for him too. I was there when he and Julia decided they couldn’t make it work. He was torn up about it, but he felt it was the right thing. When he heard you were dead…” Benji face turns bleak, “he shut down Ilsa. He– I– We’ve never seen him that way. He disappeared for a few weeks, and when he came back, he tried to be the same old Ethan, except he wasn’t. Not until New York.

Not until you showed up again.”

She tries to speak past the lump in her throat, as she hears echoes of Luther’s words, spoken near a year ago now, in a waterlogged, abandoned parking garage in somewhere, London:

_He cares about you more than he can admit._

_That’s one more worry than he can handle right now._

She steadily returns his gaze, “I’m in, Benji.”

\--------------------

Ethan’s siren call of a plea on the banks of the Thames leads her to a nondescript DC office building, all glass and steel and well-dressed staff with serious faces. Benji hustles her through well-lit corridors and then into a meeting room, where three pairs of eyes snap towards her.

Luther is the first to react, engulfing her in a warm bearhug, “I’m glad you’re here, kid.”

Next, Brandt, all bureaucratic formality, sticking his hand out for her to shake, “Welcome to the IMF, Ilsa. I mean… Anna?”

She stares bemusedly at his hand then at him, before Jane elbows him aside, “stop being so stuffy Will,” then to Ilsa, “hi, we haven’t met but I’m Jane. Met these crazy guys in Moscow a few years back and boy am I glad I have _my_ own team. Benji tells me you’re the one who will make an honest man out of our Ethan?”

“I did not say that!” Benji splutters.

“It was implied.”

Benji turns slowly red and Ilsa takes pity on him, “what’s the plan?” and Benji lights up, moving over to the screen console and furiously typing away.

Brandt lets out a long-suffering groan, “no not the presentation!” To Ilsa’s questioning look, “Benji got so excited he made a whole simulation of the plan. It’s your first walkthrough but trust me when I say we’ve seen it at least–”

“20 times.” Jane.

Brandt twists in his seat, “I was going to say 50 but 20 sounds about right too.”

Luther is interrupted by a high-pitched noise mid-chuckle, as Zhen’s voice pipes into the room “Guys, he’s coming your way. ETA 1 minute.”

“What? Zhen! You were supposed to delay, waylay, misdirect him!” Benji, a frantic note lending a higher pitch to his voice.

“I tried! Everything short of, “hey Ethan, could you stay where you are a bit longer because the possible love of your life is on her way to surprise you?” and you know, knocking him out, which I am sure would end up with me on the floor instead. Oh, and hi Ilsa.”

“Hey Zhen.”

“Okay okay, we can still salvage th-”

The door clicks open.

“I got an urgent message to come here immediately. What’s going on? Benji? Luther?” The last word trailing off as Ethan finishes scanning the room and its odd mix of occupants and his eyes come to rest on her. She thinks she has never truly seen Ethan gobsmacked until now.

“…Ilsa?”

\--------------------

The day Ethan’s IMF team is due to fly out of London they spend most of the morning tangled in bed, as his fingers leave burning trails on her body and his breath tickles near her ear.

When he leaves her apartment he stares at her face a moment too long, and she gets the strange idea that he’s committing her to memory. He doesn’t repeat his plea from the night before, but she feels it in the way he kisses her soundly, sees it in the crooked smile he gives her after that is so _Ethan_ her heart nearly melts then and there, hears in his “I’ll see you soon,” paired with a hopeful glint in his eyes that she nearly gives in to the impulse then and there.

She dwells on the goodbye for the next few hours, weeks even, thinks about _them_ and the last few years – London and Casablanca and Paris and Kashmir and New York, how each city served as anchors of sorts in their relationship, touchstones on the route to whatever-they-are-now. She thinks about the ring and the polaroid in that Shoreditch deposit box and wonders if she should have said something other than “goodbye Ethan” that morning, if she ruined what they had through her inaction.

\--------------------

Time seems to pause, and Ilsa thinks how much of a _cliché_ that is; but for a split second the team freezes mid-action: Benji half-hunched over the keyboard, eyes wide towards Ethan, Luther, hand midway to the door as if to close it, Jane caught in mid-step towards the door, Brandt, sitting placidly by the side of the large conference table looking as-if he expected this to happen (he probably did).

And Ethan… Ethan with one hand on the door handle, a foot tipped up, paused on its way down. The hoarde of expressions crossing his face is her only sign time has not stopped, his eyes wide with disbelief and wonder as he looks at her as something akin to a mirage.

“Ilsa,” he breathes again, and she thinks she detects a faint tremor in his voice.

She opens her mouth to explain but finds herself crushed up against him in a smooth motion. He presses his lips to her temple and then busies with burying his face in her neck. Amidst the muffled sounds of feet shuffling, and the nearly painful embrace he holds her in, she hears a muffled “you are here” breathed out into her hair.

They stay like this for a moment and an infinity before a cough interrupts their cocoon. He uncurls his arms from around her and takes a step back, hands lightly resting on her waist.

“You are here,” he repeats, a fading tone of disbelief in his voice.

In the absence of words, she nods, the corner of her lips quirked into a smile.

“You were the urgent message?”

“Ethan,” Brandt, cutting in. “Meet the newest member of your team.”

She puts out her hand, grinning widely now, “Anna Holm,” and then, in a playful twist to that fateful car ride in Vienna, “you must be Ethan Hunt.”

This round, he laughs, “welcome to the IMF, Ilsa Faust.”

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> \- The painting in the Louvre where Ilsa meets Sloane: "The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds" by Georges de la Tour in the Sully Wing.  
> \- Operation Annie Lennox: because Benji sometimes has a terrible sense of humour and decides Swede dreams are made of these.  
> \- The name "Anna Holm" is from a 1938 Ingrid Bergman film "A Woman's Face, where the main character gains a new face along with a new outlook in life - I promise the film is actually more interesting than that summary.


End file.
